


Little John

by ahimsabitches



Category: Treasure Planet (2002)
Genre: Blood, Gen, Other, People get shot, nobody important, to us
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-26
Updated: 2018-11-26
Packaged: 2019-08-29 13:07:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,144
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16744576
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ahimsabitches/pseuds/ahimsabitches
Summary: Done for a prompt on Tumblr: before he was known as the infamous Captain Long John Silver, he was Captain Flint's lowly cabinboy.





	Little John

John clenched his fists to keep them from trembling. The Cap’n’s bootsteps thunked in a slow, predatory arc behind him, which John could barely hear over the blood rushing past his ears.

“Point to ‘im, Johnny boy,” the Cap’n said. “Point to th’ man what was fixin’ a mutiny ‘gainst me.” 

They said when Cap’n Flint was a baby, he sucked in the starless black itself with his first breath and every word since had been as deep and cold and dark as the Big Black, but John hadn’t believed the stories.

With that voice feathering the brown curls by his right ear and its owner’s longfingered hand gripping his shoulder, John was strongly considering a change of opinion. 

Four crew, their hands bound behind their backs, gazed with a mix of misery and hatred at him, and he rested his eyes upon them in turn, as if to erase any sins they’d committed by sheer force of his own will:

Taggery, a rigger, covered in so much brownblack fur nobody could tell if he was an especially large Canid, an especially unkempt and small bugbear, or an Ursid halfbreed. He’d say something different every time he was asked, and John always had to ask someone else for confirmation when Taggery gave him an order. 

Khrek, possessed of farseeing compound eyes on stalks, the good-natured Mantid seldom came down from the crow’s nest. When he did, John was always the first one there to get an earful of whatever yarn he’d spun while he was up there. John didn’t know how a man without a proper mouth could grin, but Khrek somehow managed. 

Hal, the gruff Porcine cook, had fair words for John and foul, had friendly pats and punishing swats of his massive cloven hands, but he was never cruel. Sparing with his praise but genuine when he had given it, Hal had been a better friend to John than any on board the ship, and if John’s opinion mattered aught, he had the evenest keel of all the crew.

Upura, the ship’s hammer-headed helmsman, navigator and cartographer, was as tight-lipped as Khrek was garrulous. The scope of John’s duties-- swabbing, mending rope, peeling vegetables, and so on-- seldom took him near Upura’s post at the helm. When he had spoken to her, she had never spoken back. She’d only cut him brief, black-eyed glances. 

The four accused stood in a line on the deck, hair and shirt collars and sleeves and coattails fluttering lazily in the stellar wind. The four accused stood surrounded by their fellow crewmen, utterly and completely at John’s mercy. 

Though John was not fully grown yet and already taller than his Cap’n, the man beside him, slowly tightening his grip on the shoulder recently thickened with muscle from months of work, seemed ten feet tall. With a voice was wide and deadly as the sky.

John swallowed terror and tears, took a deep breath to steady his galloping heart, fixed his eyes at a point between Khrek and Hal, and raised a pointed finger.

A susurrus passed through the crew, arranged in two clumps fore and aft of the “trial” amidships. Cap’n Flint’s hand kept its grip momentarily, then released. John lowered his finger.

“Good boy, Johnny,” he growled. “Now.” The Cap’n’s bootsteps clunked toward the accused. John inwardly sagged, feeling the bore of the microscope move from him. Immediately a fresh wave of misery rushed forward to fill the space that terror had occupied, and he stifled a moan.  _Oh what have I done._

“Now now,” the Cap’n mused to himself, hand to his pointed chin, and wound a slow serpentine path through the line of the accused. “I don’t fancy meself a _mistrustful_ man by nature, but I do fancy meself a man what knows to take _precautions_. So I says to this young cabinboy here,” he gestured to John, and two dozen pairs of eyes rolled and locked on him, “I says to this young cabinboy when he ships out with us, I says, ‘Now Johnny boy, you be watchin’ out fer your Cap’n, y’hear. Wid’ my reputation ‘n all, there ain’t no shortage of scallywags n’ scoundrels, rotters ‘n rapscallions t’ serve on me crew, n’ I need a pair o’ eyes on ‘em t’ make sure they save their tricksterin’ fer others n’ stay true to their Cap’n.' Did I not say that, Johnny boy?”

Pinioned under his Cap'n's word and staring straight ahead without seeing, he nodded.

“So I did. An' the boy was _true_ , lads. Truer, it seems, than some 'a _you_ lot.”

Cap'n Flint finished his circuit and returned to John's side. He pulled his old flintlock out of its holster at his hip. John's heart bucked against his ribs.

“Here, Johnny boy,” the Cap'n said, grabbed his wrist, and slammed the pistol into John's open palm. “Your reward.” He pushed John's fingers closed.

John's breath froze in his throat, and he turned wild, terrified eyes on his Cap'n. “Wh...Cap'n, I... I can't-- I've never--”

The Cap'n narrowed his stacked eyes, brightdark murder glittering in them. “When I agreed to haul yer miserable skinny arse on board my ship, _boy_ , _you_ agreed to work hard, be true, and _follow. My. Orders._ ” The Cap'n's rolling-deep voice crashed over John like wave after wave of cold black water and John felt tears spiking the backs of his eyes. “Now. You _can,_ or I pitch _all of 'em_ over, an' _you_ wid' em.”

Tendons in his neck creaking, John swivelled his gaze to the four accused. None of them had tears in  _their_ eyes; all of them regared him with that same baleful dejection he was rapidly coming to  _loathe._

“Go on and be true, Johnny boy, and finish what you started.”

Of its own command, his right hand swivelled the gun in his grip. His finger looped over the trigger. He'd never shot anything other than a laser pistol before, and that only at the target painted on the wall in the crew's quarters. But he'd heard that the old flintlocks, the ones that still used gunpowder and bullets, had kickback. So he cupped the butt of the gun with his left hand and aimed. 

“I'm sorry, Hal,” he whispered, and tightened his finger around the trigger.

The earsplitting _CRACK_ riped him out of himself for a split second; when his senses returned the Cap'n was squeezing his shoulder again. His thin lips were peeled back from his long brown fangs in an extra-broad version of his own perpetual grin-snarl. Hal lay in a boneless pile of pooling blood and white apron. John snapped his mouth closed just in time to bite off a sob. 

“Good lad,” the Cap'n purred, and took his gun out of John's numb hands. “Now that business is done, I'd say you're up for a promotion.”

 


End file.
